Politics
Reasserts Itself in the Debate
Over Climate Change and Its
Hazards

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Just as the
global climate ebbs and
surges, with droughts followed
by deluges, so does the
politically charged atmosphere
that has long surrounded
research pointing to
potentially disruptive global
warming.

The
political turbulence always
seems to intensify when there
is momentum toward actions to
limit smokestack and tailpipe
releases of carbon dioxide,
the main heat-trapping
greenhouse gas, which most
experts link to rising
temperatures.

Such a surge
occurred last week. Scientists
who have called for action and
those who say risks from
warming are overblown agree
that it has been many years
since research on warming has
been the subject of such a
vigorous assault.

The week
started with an effort by
Senator John McCain,
Republican of Arizona, and
Senator Joseph I. Lieberman,
Democrat of Connecticut, to
force a vote on their proposed
bill requiring eventual limits
on emissions of greenhouse
gases.

Opponents of
curbs on emissions responded
with an intensive challenge to
the broadening scientific
consensus on global warming.
Around the capital, there was
a flurry of debates, Senate
speeches, inflammatory
editorials and talk-show
commentaries, some contending
that global warming was an
alarmist fantasy and others
saying action was essential.

In a
two-hour speech on July 28 on
the Senate floor, Senator
James M. Inhofe, the Oklahoma
Republican who is chairman of
the Environment and Public
Works Committee, said:

"With
all of the hysteria, all of
the fear, all of the phony
science, could it be that
man-made global warming is the
greatest hoax ever perpetrated
on the American people? It
sure sounds like it."

Mr. Inhofe
convened a hearing on Tuesday
that focused on the work of
the small core of researchers
who insist that there is no
evidence for human-caused
warming of any import. A
spokesman for Mr. Inhofe,
Michael Catanzaro, defended
the hearing, saying its goal
was "to strip away
political factors and just get
to the hard science."

But both
believers and skeptics said
the events vividly illustrated
how politics could contort
science. Instead of the
standard scientific process in
which researchers sift
disparate findings for common
elements to build consensus,
they say, partisans seem to be
sifting only for the findings
that fit their agendas.

Dr. Roger A.
Pielke Jr., director of the
Center for Science and
Technology Policy Research at
the University of Colorado,
said the partisanship seemed
to be spreading beyond
officials and interest groups.

"On the
climate issue, we appear to be
on the brink of having
Republican science and
Democrat science," said
Dr. Pielke, who has long
espoused acting to limits
risks from warming. "If
so, then this simply arrays
scientists on opposing sides
of a gridlocked issue, when
what we really need from
scientists is new and
practical alternatives that
might depoliticize the
issue."

Skeptics
agreed that politics was
invading the practice of
climate science.

"Climate
science is at its absolutely
most political," said Dr.
Patrick J. Michaels, a
climatologist at the
University of Virginia who,
through an affiliation with
the Cato Institute, a
libertarian group in
Washington, has criticized
statements that global warming
poses big dangers.

The Inhofe
hearing aside, Dr. Michaels
said, his fear is that
minority scientific voices
will eventually be squelched
by mainstream views.

But many of
the scientists who warn of
dangers say the real risk
arises from confusion that a
handful of skeptical
scientists has perpetuated.
That prolongs the debate over
how to respond, those
scientists say.

Strangely,
the fresh attacks on climate
science have come even as some
skeptics' projections on
warming, including those of
Dr. Michaels, have started to
overlap with those of the
dominant group of researchers.

Dr.
Michaels, in a recent paper,
projected that the global
average temperature was most
likely to rise about 3 degrees
from 1990 to 2100. That is
three times as much as the
rise measured in the 20th
century and within the
mainstream projections that
skeptical scientists had in
years past criticized as
alarmist.

The fight
has evolved from clashing over
human actions and whether they
are warming the planet to
portraying the consequences of
warming as harmful,
insignificant or even
beneficial.

The last big
peak in politics-tinged
attacks over global warming
came in 1997, when months of
lobbying preceded
international consensus on the
Kyoto Protocol, the first
treaty that required
industrialized countries to
reduce heat-trapping
smokestack and tailpipe
emissions.

That pact,
though rejected by the Bush
administration, has been
embraced by almost all other
big nations and needs only
ratification by Russia to take
effect.

After Mr.
Inhofe's hearing, both sides
quickly claimed victory,
scoring the hearing like a
sports event.

Republican
strategists said the widely
divergent views on global
warming expressed by the three
invited scientists — two
longtime skeptics and one
scientist who has built the
case for concern —
reinforced the idea that
climate science was still
split. That is a crucial goal
of industries and officials
who are fighting restrictions
on emissions.

Advocates
for cuts in emissions and
scientists who hold the
prevailing view on warming
said the hearing backfired. It
proved more convincingly, they
said, that the skeptical
scientists were a fringe
element that had to rely
increasingly on industry money
and peripheral scientific
journals to promote their
work.

The hearing
featured Dr. Willie Soon, an
astrophysicist at the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics and a co-author
of a study, with Dr. Sallie
Baliunas, also an
astrophysicist at the center,
that said the 20th-century
warming trend was unremarkable
compared with other climate
shifts over the last 1,000
years.

But the
Soon-Baliunas paper, published
in the journal Climate
Research this year, has been
heavily criticized by many
scientists, including several
of the journal editors. The
editors said last week that
whether or not the conclusions
were correct, the analysis was
deeply flawed.

The
publisher of the journal, Dr.
Otto Kinne, and an editor who
recently became editor in
chief, Dr. Hans von Storch,
both said that in retrospect
the paper should not have been
published as written. Dr.
Kinne defended the journal and
its process of peer review,
but distanced himself from the
paper.

"I have
not stood behind the paper by
Soon and Baliunas," he
wrote in an e-mail message.
"Indeed: the reviewers
failed to detect
methodological flaws."

Dr. von
Storch, who was not involved
in overseeing the paper,
resigned last week, saying he
disagreed with the peer-review
policies.

The Senate
hearing also focused new
scrutiny on Dr. Soon and Dr.
Baliunas's and ties to
advocacy groups. The
scientists also receive income
as senior scientists for the
George C. Marshall Institute,
a Washington group that has
long fought limits on gas
emissions. The study in
Climate Research was in part
underwritten by $53,000 from
the American Petroleum
Institute, the voice of the
oil industry.

Critics of
Mr. Inhofe noted that he said
in his speech last week that
his committee should consider
only "the most objective
science."

In an
interview on Friday, Dr. Soon
said he separated his
affiliation with the advocacy
groups from his research.

"I have
my views on things," Dr.
Soon said. "But as a
scientist I'm really
interested in what are the
facts."

After such a
raucous week, Dr. Soon seemed
eager to return to the
relatively quiet realm of
academic debate. "We
should all just try to resolve
this issue," he said,
"instead of going into a
Senate hearing with all this
circus."

The circus,
however, promises to return to
town. The Senate has agreed to
vote on the McCain-Lieberman
bill in the fall.